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“If you’re able, please stand.” Reading Rom. 1:18–23. “Thanks be to God.”
Football and ads. Most giving solutions to a problem I don’t have—Money to invest I don’t have. Cars I can’t afford, Medicines treating conditions I don’t have.
Which makes them tedious. That’s why it should be required that all tv commercials be funny.
We’ve heard the shorthand of the gospel already in Rom. 1:16–17. A person could be tempted to think it’s the same thing, the solution to a problem a I don’t have. You hear it in the same way you hear about a medicine that treats some intestinal problem you don’t have—where the problem and the side effects are a little embarrassing to talk about.
Or maybe you know the gospel solves a problem you have, but not the problem. The real problem you have is figuring out how to help your struggling teenager. Or get out of a dead-end job. Or find a spouse. Or meet your quota at work.
I’m not denying these are problems. But these aren’t the problems that made God move heaven and earth to solve them.
We’re in the letter of the apostle Paul to the church in Rome.
If you consider yourself an atheist, I hope you feel this passage speaking to you.
The sermon: Our problem is worse than we think because:
Pray
What’s the problem? God’s wrath is being revealed. We’ll start in Rom. 1:18.
We need to see Rom. 1:18 in the flow of Paul’s argument. He told us of the greatness of the gospel in Rom. 1:16–17. “The righteous shall live by faith.” The righteousness we need we get by faith.
Rom. 1:18 is the WHY to this statement. Why is it that “the righteous shall live by faith” and only by faith? Why can’t they live by their good works and obedience to God’s laws?
Beginning in 1:18 he’ll answer that issue. He will continue answering that issue until 3:20. By the time we get to 3:20, we will realize that in me and my works there is no hope of salvation.
In this long section he will say things like this:
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” (Rom 3:12)
19 Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20 For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. (Rom 3:19-20)
That’s where we’re headed. But let’s back up to Rom. 1:18.
He opens with an announcement about “the wrath of God.” What we learn is that God’s wrath is now being revealed.
We don’t link to think about “wrath” when we think about God. But his “wrath” is real and being revealed.
Old Testament:
Your hand will find out all your enemies; your right hand will find out those who hate you. 9 You will make them as a blazing oven when you appear. The LORD will swallow them up in his wrath, and fire will consume them. (Ps 21:8-9)
In the New Testament:
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him. (John 3:36)
What is the wrath of God?
It’s not like our anger. Certainly not like our sinful anger, where we get angry at all the wrong things. Times we should be angry we’re not. Times we shouldn’t be angry we are. God’s wrath is always the perfect response to the situation when it is expressed.
John Murray:
Wrath is the holy revulsion of God’s being against that which is the contradiction of his holiness.
John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans[1]
And Paul tells us three things about this wrath.
It’s being REVEALED RIGHT NOW. Usually we assume that God’s wrath is a future event, that his judgment is something that will happen in the future. And it is. Jesus warns us about a coming day of judgment when he will judge the living and the dead.
But Romans is saying that God is revealing his “wrath” right now. People right now are experiencing it.
It’s being REVEALED FROM HEAVEN. God is not just watching people live out their sins. He’s revealing his wrath in their lives as they do that. We’ll focus on how this works more next week—Rom. 1:24–32. He “gives them up” to their wickedness (1:24, 26, 28).
The third thing about his wrath is that it’s being REVEALED “against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (Rom. 1:18). These two terms together mean the whole array of sins we commit against God and against each other.
“Ungodliness” is all that we do that’s sin directly against God. “Unrighteousness” is all that we do that’s sin directly against people. Sin is always first against God. But it never ends there. Sin against God always result in sin against others.
In other words, Verse 18 reminds that this class is for credit and there’s a final.
God’s wrath is real and being expressed now. But it’s only a foretaste of the HELL to come.
Paul Tripp:
Hell is the ultimate reminder that we live in a moral universe under the care of a perfectly holy God. Any other view of the here and now is a delusion.
Paul Tripp, Forever[2]
God’s wrath is real. It’s not a “delusion.”
Paul ended Rom. 1:18 by saying that people “by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” What follows in these verses is an explanation about how this works.
The argument: God’s wrath is real BECAUSE God’s nature is known BUT God’s glory is rejected.
If you “suppress the truth” that implies you know the truth at some level, but you are “suppressing” it. You’re basically living in denial about it.
Read Rom. 1:19–20.
The truth that is suppressed is truth about God. God’s nature is known—and yet that truth is suppressed.
God even calls this truth “PLAIN TO THEM.” Clear as day. “SHOWN” to them.
How? In “the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20).
The creation takes the invisible God and makes him visible to everyone.
In the words of two commentators:
God has left the imprints of his glory upon his handiwork and this glory is manifest to all.
John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans[3]
Everything is stamped “Made by God.”
Tony Merida, Exalting Jesus in Romans[4]
What does the creation reveal about God as the Creator? “His invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature” (Rom 1:20).
It’s much more than a vague sense of God’s greatness. Creation reveals his POWER—but an ETERNAL power. His “DIVINE NATURE” is a summary of all that makes God God. His wisdom, knowledge, glory, holiness, goodness, love, truth, blessedness, and beauty, all these are wrapped up in his “DIVINE NATURE.”
Another way to say this: Creation shows plainly there is an INTELLIGENT DESIGNER who possesses “ETERNAL POWER” and a “DIVINE NATURE.”
Let’s think about some of this clear and plain evidence.
Only “eternal power” can create from nothing.
“Did Something Come From Nothing?” p 133ff.
Scientific consensus that the universe had a beginning. “If the universe had a beginning, it became entirely sensible, almost inevitable, to ask what produced this beginning. This radically altered the situation” (136). There is a God[5]
Antony Flew on the recent theory of multiverses: “It seems a little like the case of a schoolboy whose teacher doesn’t believe his dog ate his homework, so he replaces the first version with the story that a pack of dogs—too many to count—ate his homework” (137).
Eternal power!
Maybe we can say that his “Divine nature” is revealed by the fact it isn’t just a big universe that’s created, but a universe where there’s LIFE. Even if it’s just life on earth—it’s life! An abundance and diversity of life!
Life cannot come from non-life. Thousands and thousands of experiments have attempted to generate life of some kind from non-living things. It can’t be done.
Someone ALIVE made all the living things! The LIVING ONE made all that is alive.
And the LIFE he has created isn’t just plants and animals, bare life. But “consciousness” with human life. Not just brute strength, but his DIVINE NATURE coming out.
Something “beyond nature,” as C.S. Lewis called it. Something more than mere matter. Something with consciousness and intentionality. We see that in us, and it points us to God himself. In our ability to reason and reflect and imagine, we show that we’re more than mere stuff.
Conciousness is a way that God’s “Divine Nature” is “clearly perceived.” A Creator with a mind of infinite wisdom and knowledge!
Life on earth is a marvel. As more and more research is done in more and more fields of study, it’s clear that what we experience on Earth is astounding. If things like pull of gravity, the speed of light, our closeness to the sun, the size of our moon, our closeness to Jupiter and Saturn, the consistency of gravity, even the rate at which the universe is expanding—if any of these things had been even slightly different, life on earth would be impossible.
There’s an overall intricacy of design in the universe at a large scale that points to a DESIGNER.
William Paley (1743–1805) came up with the watch/watchmaker version of this: If you see a watch on the beach, you assume there was a Watchmaker, not that the watch created itself from nothing.
Here we go from the uber-massive or philosophical to the almost infinitely complex—and small!
Look at DNA.
John Lennox: “The human genome is the longest word we’ve ever discovered. And we can call it a word because it’s written in a chemical language of four letters.
Strands of DNA combine in the nucleus of the cells of your body. Each of these strands would be about 6-feet long if you uncoiled them. They contain massive amounts of information.
All your digital pictures could fit inside just a few cells, 20 or 30. But...there are about 40 trillion cells in your body.
The sophistication of the human body is astonishing.
It was the intricacy and almost impossibility of DNA that made the atheist Oxford philosopher Antony Flew turn from atheism to theism. He acknowledged the obvious: There’s simply no way this happens by accident and some evolutionary process.
In the 1940s a philosopher at Oxford Antony Flew was debating C.S. Lewis. At the time C.S. Lewis was in charge of The Socratic Society, which had the slogan, “Follow the evidence wherever it leads.” Well, in the 1940s, Antony Flew rejected Lewis’s Christianity and arguments for creation being the work of a Creator.
But fast-forward 50 years to 2004. Flew is at a symposium in NYC and is asked whether “the origin of life pointed to the activity of a creative Intelligence” (74). He then said to everyone’s amazement:
“Yes, I now think it does...almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together. It’s the enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together. The meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is simply minute. It is all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results were achieved, which looked to me like the work of intelligence.”
Antony Flew, There is a God[6]
All of this is before us. This is God making it “PLAIN” and “SHOWING” to all people that he is the INTELLIGENT DESIGNER who possesses “ETERNAL POWER AND A DIVINE NATURE.”
And therefore, “THEY ARE WITHOUT EXCUSE.” No one can plead ignorance.
In the truest sense, THERE ARE NO ATHEISTS.
Atheists say God doesn’t exist. But here’s the actual reality: God says atheists don’t exist.
But you’re saying, wait a minute, I know an atheist. Or many atheists. Or maybe even, I am an atheist. So, how does this happen?
That takes us to the third piece of our argument here: God’s wrath is real BECAUSE God’s nature is known BUT God’s glory is rejected. Now we focus on the last part of this, God’s glory is rejected.
Read Rom. 1:21–23.
Do you see that progression?
Our response to God’s creation? We reject his glory. We trade it for something infinitely less, something “mortal” instead of something “immortal,” something worth nothing instead of something worth everything.
A disastrous trade.
We got there because we didn’t respond rightly to what Creation was telling us. We “did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.”
When we fail to do that, it changes us. Changes us in our “thinking” and in our “hearts.”
Sin is disastrous. Like opening up the hood of your car and dumping a thousand gallons of mud in the engine. The engine can never run well with a thousand gallons of mud in it.
Our HEARTS and MINDS are like that. When you throw a thousand gallons of sin in them, they don’t work right.
Sin ruins our ability to THINK and corrupts our HEARTS.
What should be LOGICAL and REASONABLE appears FOOLISH. What should be FOOLISH to us appears LOGICAL and REASONABLE.
Our hearts LOVE and HATE the wrong things. We HATE what we should LOVE, and we LOVE what we should HATE.
And the final great evidence for this is in the verse: we take “the glory of the immortal God” and trade it away. It’s a vivid picture.
Knowing God we possess something infinitely valuable, infinitely glorious, infinitely worthy. In Paul’s picture it’s like we go up to a guy at a flea market selling trinkets and see some plastic figurine. We ask him, “How about an even swap?” He looks at us with raised eyebrows, and says, “Uh, ok, sure.” You leave thinking you did something reasonable. He knows you are a complete idiot.
That’s why God’s wrath is being revealed. Because God’s nature is known, but God’s glory is rejected.
This passage is a description of all people apart from Christ. This is a description of a heart and mind that is still living in opposition to the Creator and Judge of all people.
And because God’s wrath and hell, the ultimate demonstration of his wrath, are real, this makes the problem of being God’s enemy worse than you think. Choosing sin instead of God is far more than a life-style choice. It’s a matter of life and death, heaven and hell.
In 1974 when Billy Graham was speaking to the massive Lausanne Conference on evangelism, he opened by speaking of what we must affirm.
A second concept we expect to reaffirm is ‘the lostness’ of man apart from Jesus Christ. The Bible portrays man as originally created by God for fellowship with him. However, sin intervened in the Garden of Eden. Man is now born alienated from God. Without Jesus Christ, he is lost and without hope in this world or the next. It was Jesus who spoke most pointedly about the reality of heaven and hell. Notice the terms Jesus used to describe the state of the lost: ‘a place of wailing’; ‘a place of weeping’; ‘a furnace of fire’; ‘a place of torment’; ‘a place of utter darkness’; ‘a place of everlasting punishment’; ‘a place prepared for the devil and his angels’. These descriptions of our Lord are terrible enough without even trying to interpret them. Our Lord further said, ‘He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him’ (John 3:36). Many years ago, a man in England on his way to the gallows was being warned by the Anglican chaplain of the ‘wrath to come’ unless he repented. He turned to the chaplain and said, ‘If I believed the way you believe, I would crawl across England on broken glass to warn people.’ My fellow evangelists and missionaries, if men are lost as Jesus clearly thought they are, then we have no greater priority than to lift up a saving Christ to them as Moses did the brazen serpent in the wilderness.
Billy Graham[7]
The lostness of humanity apart from Christ is real. But so is the gospel offer. We heard about it last week:
“The righteous shall live by faith.” (Rom. 1:17)
Death and judgment are ours if we live in unbelief. But with faith in Christ, we shall be righteous and shall live. Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is the only pathway to salvation.
There’s another side to this text for us who are Christians.
Let’s pray.
[1] John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1959), 1:35.
[2] Paul Tripp, Forever: Why You Can’t Live Without It (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), 63, 60–61.
[3] John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1959), 1:40.
[4] Tony Merida, Exalting Jesus in Romans, Christ-Centered Exposition (Brentwood, TN: Holman, 2021), 24.
[5] Antony Flew, There is a God (HarperOne, 2007), 75.
[6] Antony Flew, There is a God (HarperOne, 2007), 75.
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